All Things are Too Small has way of traveling through the world where it is both above and within the muck: “The best sex, probably, was the sex people had when they really believed they would got to hell for it–but craved it so badly that they had it anyway.” Its gentle gripes and alluringly pointed suggestions on how to survive in the muddled swamp of modern existence make for time well spent—you might find your own way through on your own, but this way you get a local’s expertise.
Habit produces freedom for thought beyond immediacy—how much time would I waste, in my daily life, if I had to think about every breath I took?—but habit can force us down paths that are no longer beneficial. Once habits become unmoored from the goals they supported, their vestigial remains can haunt us, warp the way we approach the world:
Although goals can be satisfied in various ways, there is only one way to satisfy a habit: by repeating it exactly.
After a generation of watching images on a screen and being told over and over, “This isn’t real, this is just entertainment,” the habit of dismissing the flickering shadows projected into our lives has become our reality. We don’t believe what we see, nor do we even believe what we say—the always-on nature of the network means your “brand” can never waver: always be riffing; I’m just kidding. Unless…; say whatever gets the most likes. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to retweet it, does it make an impact?
Read MoreThere are many more examples, each interesting in their own way. White flour was surprisingly and particularly interesting from a historical standpoint: the steam engine unshackled mills from rivers and shifted industrial concentration to centralized factories, allowing the growth of urbanization. White flour “…is composed of very small particles of the endosperm of the grain, and lacks the germ and the bran.” It didn’t spoil as quickly as the whole grains ground at the local grist; it fact, it keep long enough to be shipped overseas to feed the foreign armies of the Napoleonic Wars. Once those wars were over, the industrial mills—created and optimized to grind ultrafine white flour—flooded U.S. markets with cheap white flour, which used to be the province of socio-economic posturing between the wealthy; cakes and fluffy breads became de rigueur.
That’s pretty great, right? Cheap flour! No more need for the laborious work of hauling grains to the gristmill, a task typically relegated to the physically stronger male of the household. No more need for hand-grinding grain, a tedious task usually left for children! Everyone has more time thanks to white flour! Oh, but...well, everyone but mother.
…[t]his is thoughtful, fascinating, insightful details into a theoretical realm of possibility that should excite every living person on the planet. What a trip, just to consider the subjective time-dilation increased mental processing speed would engender; that near light-speed travel might feel to an AI what air travel does to me and you gives me chills.
This is what I mean when I call Superintelligence an impressive feat; I cannot name another book that spits out so much irksome social theory that I would still recommend without caveat. The chains of logic are so clear and smart; it crafts a space to dislike the premise yet love the process. And—as the book itself makes clear—it may believe what it posits, but it doesn’t need you to; Superintelligence just wants people to start talking about the issue.
This paragraph took about...six hours of tinkering to create. I will say that, at the point this was being spit out, I did not think my grand experiment was worth it. I mean, I was thrilled i got anything to work (see above, wherein I produced nothing but sequential numbers), but this sample of my trained model was pretty raw. Perhaps you could separate out some of the parts about “pizza,” “burgers,” and “my tights” to tell a story. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. I want you to see, warts and all, the nonsense I had to pick through to dredge up a few good lines. Context, thy name is not Machine Learning.
Read MoreThis is Why didn’t teach me about trolling as an act unto itself. It gave me a reason to think about trolling as a reactive impulse to a society that sells its own cruelty back to itself. That’s a real cognitive framework to make trolling comprehensible as a part of culture, rather than as the aberration that people pretend it to be.
Read MoreEngagement with and understanding of more than just technical breakdowns makes for text that is often engaging regardless of your proximity to bots, AI, or ML writing. It is interesting to see how tech-minded people with a firm grasp of the humanities—rather than the near-exhausted trope of the literary stodge trying to make sense of technology—engage with cultural source. The written word isn’t treated as mere grist for the GPT-2 mill.
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